Karen's story

This is a pleasant time of the year. Spring hasn't actually sprung yet, but the days are perceptibly longer, there's much more radiant heat in the sun, enough so the solar heat raises the temperature in my west-facing office or study to about 30C; unless I strip down to shirtsleeves, I swelter. The downside is that snowfalls like the one we had last weekend, melt very rapidly and there are pools of water everywhere, some of them deceptively deeper than they appear. A shoe-full of ice-cold slushy water can ruin a walk in the sun. There are other grey, windy, sleety days when it's best to stay indoors.

I'm fortunate to have something that absorbs my interest totally on such days. My friend Karen Trollope Kumar has written a memoir and is sending it to me one chapter at a time for critical comment. When Karen Trollope was a final year medical student at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she went to Lucknow in India to get experience of medicine in that setting. She met Pradeep Kumar, they had a 4-year courtship, much of it by correspondence like Wendy's and mine. They married in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony; Pradeep and Karen went to Rishikesh, where the sacred river Ganges changes from a mountain torrent to a broad river. They lived for several years in an ashram. She learned Hindi and learned a lot about the culture and lives of the local people, especially the women whose lives were hard, often hazardous, punctuated by many pregnancies that sometimes ended badly for the baby, mother or both. Her own first pregnancy was complicated but ended happily with the birth of a beautiful daughter, Sonia. They came back to Canada for the birth of their second child, Raman, then returned to a town called Pauri, higher in the Himalayan foothills than Rishikesh. Pradeep ran a network of rural community clinics and Karen focused increasingly on the health of the women, also on upgrading the training and skill sets of traditional village midwives. She became increasingly interested in a common gynecological complaint of the village women that was not caused by infection or inflammation but seemingly was these women's way of "speaking through their bodies" about their unhappy lot in life, in other words it was a culturally determined disease. She wrote up this work for her PhD in medical anthropology -- an elegant and erudite thesis that I had the pleasure of reading some years ago. But the district where they were working was shaken not only by a major earthquake, but by corruption, violence, murder, threats to her life. Wisely, Pradeep insisted on getting her and their two children safely away from all this trouble. They came back to Canada. Karen now works in family medicine at McMaster University medical school. Their hearts are still in India, however: they have bought a plot of land, built a community centre, and intend to go back to live and work there when Sonia and Raman have both left the family nest. So far Karen has sent me nine draft chapters of her book. She writes very well, and after reading each draft chapter as soon as I receive it, I await the next chapter impatiently, feeling rather as I imagine Charles Dickens's readers must have felt as they awaited each chapter of his serialized novels. I know, more or less, what is still to come. Since returning to Canada they have established themselves very well in Hamilton. Pradeep and Karen have been back to India several times, and so have Sonia and Raman; they are wedded to the culture and life of India and would rather be there than here; or at the least, have a foot in both worlds. I should not, and will not, judge the book before I've read all of it. But based on what I've read so far, I'm confident that this book will interest many readers. I hope she and her agent can interest a good quality publisher in publishing it.